Friday, 31 December 2010

Snow business

Greetings from the mother country! If you've got nothing better to do than follow my tweets you may have noticed that it's bloody cold. The use of a proper adjective there qualifies the degree of cold. If I'd used a socal adjective like "freakin" or even "damn bro" you could expect it to be about 12 centigrade in real money or in the high 50s if you insisit on those retrograde yankee degrees. But my use of a British adjective indicates a whole new level of hypothermia: it's -19 c(-2 in roman catholic) and on top of that we have about 25cm of snow! Quite the winter wonderland.

Since getting back I've ridden outside once, well nearly twice. Friday was "only" -5 and there want any snow so we rode for 4 hours, my hands burned like they were covered in molten lead! That night we got hit by about 15cm of snow and the roads were pretty much impassable by the next morning so training has been limited to the mind (and groin) numbing pleasure that is riding inside. Any top tips would be welcome. Apparently taping a note saying HTFU onto your stem only works for a few hours. I'm burning through the laundry at an unprecedented rate of knots (2-3X sweaty indorr sessions a day = lots of chamois laundry) and rapidly running out of coffee (ahem @birdrockcoffeeroasters hook me up!). in temps like these everything becomes a mission, the chickens' water tank freezes and requires daily defrosting, the horses need more food as they cant get at the grass and going outside is an exercise in the application of sheeps' hair.

After a couple of days piloting the rollers I decided I'd had enough. I cued up some chopper reid and grabbing my snow shovel and set out to create what, if I say so myself was one of the more burly cyclocross loops that the village of murcot has ever seen. It included a pretty "sick" kicker a berm best described as "gnarly" (bro) and some "hella" cool (literally) snowbarriers. Sadly the next day saw it disappear under a fresh coat of snow. I also managed a 4 hour hike the other day, apparently its hard to navigate when everything is covered in white powder so I may have gone a little further than planned. Still it made for a fun day and everyone in my village officially KNOWS I'm a nutter now.

I went to get my hair cut the other day and the hairdresser told me she thought it was funny that I was essentially am 8 year old inside. And it was indeed the case that come the morning of the 25th I was indeed awake long before my young cousins (with whom I was sharing a room) – luckily my aunt had my back and had subtly planted a stocking at the end of my bed so I could indulge myself with the delights of a chocolate orange (if Terry wants to claim it he can come and get it back), some pretty awesome trinkets (hello Spork) and a copy of new scientist which my cousin was reading to try and appear clever. Having not delved into the world of scientific literature (even in this "lite" form) since I got my place to read history at Oxford 5 years ago I can safely inform the assembled ignoramuses like myself that there is no cause for alarm NOTHING INTERESTING HAS HAPPENED, well to be more accurate nothing interesting happened lat week anyway. Or at least, nothing that was interesting to someone who isn't really interested in such matters. Funny that.

The rest of crimbo was pretty uneventful, I set insulin world records, enjoyed a quality lunch of poultry and pudding, took the dog (and my bloated stomach) for a walk and put some sweet orange HUDZ on the cx rig in prep for the Kenilworth boxing day cx the next day. But that, children, is another story….